Search Site

Areas of Work

Peace & Disarmament

Our peace and disarmament programme grows out of a long Quaker history of working for peace, understanding that this means more than the absence of overt violence and has fundamentally to do with social and economic justice and political participation. Where these are denied, the roots of violence can be found. QUNO works with diplomats, NGOs, UN staff and others in Geneva and beyond to support the creation of legal instruments, new policy and effective practice.

Our work focuses on encouraging a more holistic and integrated approach to preventing destructive conflict and building peace at the international and local level. To this end we collaborate with our colleagues in human rights, climate change and food and sustainability, to explore opportunities for cross-cutting approaches that more accurately address the complexity of systems of injustice and violence. Our recent publications can be found here.

QUNO Geneva understands peacebuilding as both the development of human and institutional capacity for resolving conflicts without violence, and the transformation of the conditions that generate destructive conflict. Therefore, in this latter sense, it must include work to prevent destructive conflict.

Over its history QUNO has focused much of its peace-related effort on fostering disarmament negotiations at the UN, for example on chemical and nuclear weapons. By the mid-1990s QUNO also recognised that tremendous damage to communities and societies was being done by conventional weapons, particularly small arms and landmines, and worked to raise awareness of this problem and seek effective ways to tackle it at international level.